Review: The 39 Steps, York Theatre Royal, until March 29

11:09am Thursday 27th March 2008

RICHARD Hannay sits in his leather armchair, with his pipe and pencil-slim moustache and problems mounting in his lonely London abode.

If he did not have enough on his plate already, Patrick Barlow's stage adaptation of The 39 Steps requires him to negotiate his way through John Buchan's novel and Alfred Hitchcock's 1935 spy thriller in a cast of only four.

In this maelstrom, David Michaels's Hannay, dashing, upright and ever-so-slightly Basil Fawlty in his comic mannerisms, decides his best cure for the blues is a night at the London Palladium.

However, who should end up falling into his lap, quite dead in his arms at home, but Annabella Schmidt (Clare Swinburne), the mysterious German woman who had earlier fired a gun from the box opposite Hannay's.

Murder suspect number one, Hannay hot-foots it to Scotland by train, with policemen, secret agents and assorted women crossing his path (all played with joie de vivre and dazzling timing by Colin Mace and Alan Perrin, bar two more roles - one femme fatale and one comely, shy farmer's wife - for the chameleon Swinburne).

As first seen whizzing around the West Yorkshire Playhouse in June 2005 and in the West End and on Broadway since then, Barlow's "touching up" of Simon Corble and Nobby Dimon's original concept of a breathless stage version of Hannay's adventures has a theatrical sleight of hand in the best traditions of Barlow's pioneering National Theatre of Brent.

The short-handed company has the clipped, brisk and plucky spirit of one of those English touring troupes of yore, where the embattled performers must steer the play to harbour, move much of the scenery and often improvise their own props from furniture, even stepladders for the Forth Bridge escape, while at the beck and call of an unseen, erratic stage manager.

A miniature train and Edinburgh station sign traverse the stage on a pulley on cue, as if by magic, but will the phone always ring on time?

From shadowplay for a bi-plane crash to the death-defying finale at the Palladium, Maria Aitken's redoubtable cast navigates the high-speed twists and turns of this Hitchcock homage without a hitch, but with the essence of Hitch retained.

Somehow the quartet balances comic release with all the tension of a thriller in 100 madly inventive minutes. Hats off to them.

Box office: 01904 623568

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